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How Katine's education has improved

Ogwolo primary, a community school run by parents and backed by the Katine project, is bucking the wider trend towards academic underachievement in Uganda. Anne Perkins looks at the lessons that can be learned

Class apart ... the precociously gifted Patricia Asio, right, is carrying the torch for Ogwolo primary school, where improvements have included new classrooms, desks and textbooks. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

Patricia Asio is a precocious 13-year-old. At her current rate of progress she will be graduating to senior school next year, at least two years ahead of many of her fellow students.

This summer she scored the second highest grade in exams which mark the halfway point of P6, the penultimate year of primary school. Her explanation is simple. "I read very hard," she says.

Next year her school, Ogwolo primary in Katine, has ambitions of becoming the first school in the district to get students through their final P7 exams with top marks, grade one. Most rural schools are proud if a majority of students in the final year manage a grade five – a reflection not of the students' abilities, but of the desperate shortage of investment in almost all of Uganda's schools.

That Ogwolo looks set to triumph is a credit, above all, to the parents who run the community school. But it is also one of Amref's biggest success stories. The project played a vital role, constructing new classrooms and providing desks and textbooks.

Since the launch of the initiative, Amref has built 16 new classrooms and repaired a further 22. It has delivered more than 1,100 desks and distributed 5,147 textbooks to the 15 primary schools in Katine. Five of those are community schools which, like Ogwolo, have been set up by parents and have no government support.

"Before, when it rained," says Patricia, "the books got wet and we got wet. Now I sit at a desk instead of on the floor. The new classrooms make me feel happy."

Ogwolo is a pioneering school in other ways. One of the parents' innovations – a much ignored recommendation from the government that has been supported by Amref – is to encourage all parents to provide some food for their children to eat during the day.

"When I am hungry," Patricia says in her excellent English, "I feel like I want to go to sleep. It is a big difference to have food."

Having built the classrooms, Amref also supplied 500 textbooks to the school (not enough, as Amref acknowledges) and 39 desks. The headteacher and members of the parent-teacher association (PTA) and the school management committee (SMC) take part in regular training sessions provided by the government, but organised by Amref.

When it works – as it plainly does in Ogwolo – the triumvirate at the top can be a powerful force. Francis Elietu, who chairs the Ogwolo SMC, found the training invaluable.

"I didn't know how to run a school," he says. "I learned how to co-ordinate activities and conduct meetings."

Elietu and his committee set the budget for the school, which dictates the fees. Martin Olipa, the chairman of the PTA, has to persuade the parents to pay them. "I explain the benefits. I discuss the amount we want to raise," says Olipa. "About 80% of parents pay." The ones who do not are supported by those who do.

Amref has trained dozens of Katine's parents and teachers in leadership and management skills. Samuel Esango runs the SMC at Kadinya, another community school that has sprung up to beat the overcrowding at Olwelai school. He has a special reason to appreciate the five new classrooms at the school built by Amref.

Twenty years ago, he was a pupil at the school when it was held in the house of a village elder who liked teaching. They later used the church, before finally building classrooms of grass and mud.

Esango's parents had been killed in one of the raids by the Karamojong tribe which catastrophically destabilised the area in the years after the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, came to power in 1986.

Later Esango had to flee Katine again when the Lord's Resistance Army terrorised the area. That time, his brother died.

But he is back in his village, working his family's land, and his two older children have started at the school.

"We worked very hard to get the school, and we will work very hard to keep it going," he says, adding that the training organised by Amref has been invaluable.

"Since training, I have ideas about planning. I can set out a programme. I understand how to conduct a meeting."

There is a third community school in the area to cope with the Olwelai overflow, but one with a less happy story to tell.

Amorikot school became a kind of milestone in the progress of the Katine project. Its six new classrooms and its new latrines, opened two years ago amid great fanfare including a roasted ox and the presence of many of the most important local dignitaries, stilled anxieties that the project was focusing too much on "software" – training and education – and not enough on the "hardware", such as buildings.

But software matters: and development is not only about glossy new projects. At Amorikot, the first head swiftly acquired a local reputation for corruption, seriously undermining the trust between teachers and parents that is critical when parents pay the teachers' salaries.

The experience dealt a major blow to the school, one which the new head, Moses Emesu, is still struggling to overcome.

Last year, as the Guardian reported on the Katine website, there was an arson attack on his home. Attendance and enrolment at the school have become a problem. The day we visited, only about a third of the register of pupils were present. But the biggest problem is persuading parents to pay. Without pay, teachers leave. With only six teachers of the optimum 10, the school is now seriously understaffed.

A year ago, Amref stepped in to negotiate between the school and the parents. District education officials travelled to a meeting in Katine in an attempt to renew the parents' commitment.

Emesu was so worried by the arson attack, which destroyed almost all his possessions, that he had to be persuaded not to leave the school. Now he throws his heart into making it work. But it is clear that he is finding the fight almost beyond him.

"The parents here are so backward," he says in frustration as he tries to make up for the teacher shortage by juggling two classes at once. "The attitude of the community is so negative."

He lists the barriers to progress. "It is the traditional culture. Early marriage and the pursuit of status in the form of cattle, and a growing number of households in a family."

Talk to any girl in P6 or P7 in Katine and they tell the same tale: there is only a handful of girls left from the original group who joined the first year of primary school. At Amorikot, there were orginally 30 girls in the P4 year (average age 11); now, there are just seven.

Teddy Apio and Betty Akira, two of the seven, remember a girl who left last year when she was 14. "Her father quarrelled with her," Teddy says. "He abused her and called her stupid, and a widow. He said she should get married, not waste his money going to school."

Many other girls, they say, have babies. Others won't come because their parents won't buy the uniform, or the exercise books.

Teddy says her father is different. "It is difficult to find the money. But he wants me to be educated. I want to study in senior school and get a job, and then maybe I will get married."

The interrelationship between schooling, government and community attitudes has made education a tough component to tackle. Big progress has been made, but changing attitudes to education is a process, not an event.